Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and maybe other days too.

Monday, January 07, 2013

BORP? XVI

White to play

A happy new year to you all. I trust each and every one of you, our esteemed and most valued readers, have had a good Christmas - or whatever holiday break it is that you do or do not celebrate - and 2013 finds you in excellent form.

Enough with social niceties. Time to resume blogging.

My announcement for today is that I have a New Year's Resolution. Yes, such things are normally dead in the water by now, but I have one and what is more it's still alive: by the time the year is out I aim to have published 52 blog posts on rook and pawn endings.

Why do this? First and foremost it's to force myself to actually look closely at these positions for a full twelve months. I don't expect it will 'improve' my game. I'm simply not playing enough at the moment for it to be likely that any kind of study would lead to better results. Actually, the very fact that I'm not playing as much 'real chess' as I'd like is one of the main motivations for doing this.

I'm not able to play club chess as much as I'd like just now, but I didn't want to give up the game totally. I needed to find some kind of chessic activity to fill my time, and I got to thinking "why not focus on one particular area of the game? Why not rook and pawn endings?" Not for any particular reason. Just because.

So that's what I did. These posts will just be a diary I keep along the way. Let's see how it goes.

In the meantime, allow me to redirect your attention to the position at the top of today's post. It is, fairly obviously, White to play.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Unlike ejh's World Champion might have beens, this is easy enough to cheat by looking it up on the Shredder tablebase. It's still a long and probably instructive process to demonstrate a win for Black, even after the incorrect choice of opening move.

On a slightly different subject,'The Sicilian Defence' is the title of Wednesdays episode of Midsummer Murders,which has a strong Chess theme and is about a killer targeting members of a Chess club.Might be worth taping a quick whizz through?

I believe I know the answer but I'm not going say since I've spent some time exploring endings with Jonathan.

Anyhow, 52 blogs on rook endings in a year would be impressive - and, I think, due recognition for an important part of the game. In his book, '100 Endgames You Must Know', Jesus de la Villa, gives an interesting statistic: in a database of 4 million games, 320,000 (8%) had a rook ending. And, for what it's worth, only 120,000 of these were drawn.

Presumably rook endgames are relatively frequent because it is relatively quite hard to exchange four rooks - eg compared to knights and bishops which can be interchangably snapped off in the opening, or only two queens which rove around the board more freely.

Kh1 is the drawing move. I've never thought of it as a shortside technique before (@Dan) but I suppose it is of sorts.

As JC points out - the key point is that against a knight's pawn you can defend by shuffling your rook along on the back rank as long as your king is in front of the pawn. Kf1 allows the Black to force White's king out of the way.

Roger's quite correct about Tablebase, of course. Funnily enough, that's something I hope to be coming back to in future weeks.